#252

So, the thing with the "fuck you, politician/political party/outgroup/ingroup/concept" stickers to put on your car. Really, any loyalty to a culture of strife and division. It honestly baffles me that it still works. We are in the twenties. The two thousand and twenties, though! How, how, how in the FUCK does this Woodrow Wilson vs. Teddy Roosevelt shit still reign supreme? 

Internet has been mainstream for around twenty-five years now. I learned to use the freaking internet in the second grade. How, in the last quarter-century, have we not learned that paying money for a physical symbol of your allegiance to a mass-media driven concept is completely and utterly without sense? 

Can it truly be possible that the ability for so many humans to look up enough information to illuminate to each and every one of them that we are one single family and just a very few of us abuse most of the rest of us into thinking that we are not--is good for absolutely nothing? Because we just won't do it? Because we don't want to?

Is it possible that we cannot function without feeling that we are part of a good team, and that there can be no good team without a bad team, and therefore, if there is no bad team, why, one will have to be invented? And if there are teams, must there not be symbols, and colors, and objects to buy, and spectacles, and winners and losers at sufficient intervals to remind us that we are winning, or losing, and must keep winning, or win again? Eternally?

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So, the thing with the meme of sounding well-informed.

The condescending, formulaic style of prattle that the mediocre and relatively seasoned rely on in order to convince the naive, the fresh-faced, and the gullible that they speak with authority derived from a superior level of intelligence and pedagogic achievement has developed to the point that the sons of a bitches that avail themselves of this wretched sophistry can watch fifty yooootooobb videos made by laughable charlatans and not only think themselves a didactic maverick, but cannot conceive of any information that complexifies or contradicts or recontextualizes the content of their crash course at yooootoooobb university as being processable, let alone digestible. 

Placing your intellectual premiums into sounding well-informed instead of learning to deeply research and read widely will literally kill your ability to think. It will destroy your ability to understand modes of thought outside of your particular meme web. It will trap you on little islands of specified information that you cannot depart from, with no way to swim anywhere else.

Hope being able to repeat a bunch of shit that an asshole himself repeated after "reading" it on the internet because another fucker "read" part of a book and thought to reconstitute it for the online cred is extremely cool and worth it to somebody. Hope that shit isn't in any way garbled, or otherwise compromised.

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In the end, who gives fuck. What actual, ethical use does most of our knowledge actually end up getting put to? I wonder sometimes if any beyond basic tool use and enough words to tell a story about why the sun comes up and rains fall from the sky. Maybe we didn't need to get much further than learning to fish from a little boat.

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This has been my modern H.L. Mencken impression, thank you

--JL